


Spiderwebs of Strings

by twilighteve



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Romance, Romantic Soulmate, i might not have put all characters and relationships. there are so many, platonic soulmate, strings of fate au, the triplets and webby and della being scroldie shippers lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:47:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27387424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twilighteve/pseuds/twilighteve
Summary: Huey saw the Strings from the corners of his eyes, flitting and disappearing when he turned to look at them head on, but they were always there, present, as real as anything could be.Dewey saw the Strings between blinks and turns, there one moment and gone the next, but he knew they were there even though he couldn’t see them as clearly as his brothers.Louie saw the Strings as clearly as the clouds in a summer day, bright and solid and present no matter what he did.Some people are connected through the Strings of Fate they have around their fingers. Life spins on anyway.
Relationships: B.O.Y.D & Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera, B.O.Y.D. (Disney: DuckTales) & Gyro Gearloose, Daisy Duck/Donald Duck, Della Duck & Donald Duck, Dewey Duck & Huey Duck & Louie Duck, Dewey Duck & Huey Duck & Louie Duck & Webby Vanderquack, José Carioca & Donald Duck & Panchito Pistoles, Lena (Disney: DuckTales) & Violet Sabrewing & Webby Vanderquack, Scrooge McDuck/"Glittering" Goldie O'Gilt
Comments: 23
Kudos: 123
Collections: Finished111





	Spiderwebs of Strings

For as long as Huey, Dewey, and Louie can remember, they always came in three. They were individuals of their own, true, but they were together, like a trinity that no one could break.

The fact that they had always been connected with green Strings looping over their thumbs for as long as they could remember only strengthened the fact.

It didn’t take long for them to realize that not everyone have the Strings. Some people have vibrant red linking their fingers, or yellow, or blue, or green like theirs, or even purple. Some had white that would soon turn to an array of colors they slowly learned to predict. Fewer still had black.

Uncle Donald hugged them and brought them to his laps, the way he always seemed to cherish doing when they were small and kept doing even though they grew too large for his laps to accommodate at once. “Some people have Strings,” he would say, in the scratchy voice that they had learned to decipher over the years. “That means they’re connected to each other. That means they’re soulmates.”

“Soulmates?” Dewey asked, mostly for clarification.

“Yeah, it means you’ll be together forever,” Uncle Donald said, in the over-simplified way an adult would explain complicated concepts to little children.

“Does that mean we will be together forever, Uncle Donald?” Louie asked, grabbing hold of Huey and Dewey by their Stringed hands.

“Of course you will,” Uncle Donald answered, and he hugged them, and kissed them at their crowns. It was warm, and safe, and comforting, and the triplets soon fell asleep in his hold.

* * *

Huey saw the Strings from the corners of his eyes, flitting and disappearing when he turned to look at them head on, but they were always there, present, as real as anything could be.

Dewey saw the Strings between blinks and turns, there one moment and gone the next, but he knew they were there even though he couldn’t see them as clearly as his brothers.

Louie saw the Strings as clearly as the clouds in a summer day, bright and solid and present no matter what he did.

Their own Strings had always appeared clearly before them, even though other people’s Strings didn’t always. The Strings were intangible to them despite being painfully visible, though going through them felt like walking through a spiderweb, not-so-invisible Strings clinging to them that disappeared as soon as they went through.

It took them years until they realized Strings weren’t always visible to everyone else.

It started with a classmate. The girl clung to her newly acquired boyfriend (“Who even have boyfriends at six?” Louie asked incredulously), declaring loudly that they were soulmates and that they would be together forever.

Dewey, his lack of tact always present and even stronger as a younger child, blurted, “But you don’t have any String?”

Annie Teal proceeded to have a legendary temper tantrum that would have teachers talking about it in years to come while said boyfriend, Norman Shelduck, went ahead to punch Dewey, who managed to avoid getting punched when Huey quickly went to hold Norman back while Louie slunk away to get a teacher. They were corralled away to the principal’s office and their respective caretakers were called in. Annie’s parents somehow managed to calm the girl enough to talk while Norman’s mother tiredly asked him why he wanted to punch Dewey.

“Because he made Annie cry,” was the boy’s simple answer.

“And why did Annie cry?”

Annie hiccupped loudly. “Beca-a-ause… he said me an’ Norman can’t be together forever!”

“I didn’t say that!” Dewey protested. “I just said you don’t have String!”

Uncle Donald breathed in. “Dewey, that’s not a nice thing to say. You don’t know that.”

Dewey stomped in frustration. “I do know that! They don’t have String, but Annie’s mom and dad have a red one and Mrs. Screamer have blue one and me and Huey and Louie have green ones. But they don’t have one!” He stared pleadingly at Uncle Donald. “I’m not lying!”

But Uncle Donald just blinked. “You can see Strings?”

Dewey blinked back. “Yes? So can Huey and Louie. Everyone can.”

The principal – Mrs. Screamer – sighed. “No, Dewey, not everyone can.” She rubbed her temples. “I think we know why this got out of hand. Annie and Norman can’t see String, right?”

“As far as we know, no,” Annie’s mother answered, petting her daughter’s hair between her hiccups. Norman’s mother shook her head.

“Oh,” Dewey breathed.

* * *

Dewey took the fact that him being able to see Strings was special easily, welcoming the new friends that flocked to him to ask about whose String was connected to who with open arms. Louie, ever the opportunist, quickly charged them with a small fee to know about the Strings, while Huey took a more subdued approach to it.

“Oh come on, you wet blanket. We’re popular!” Dewey said, one night, in their shared room in the houseboat.

“I don’t know, Dewey,” Huey said, chewing a thumb. Louie pulled the hand out of Huey’s mouth and the oldest took his guidebook, wiping his thumb on his shirt them using it to card through the pages. “The Junior Woodchuck Guide says Strings is a private matter and we shouldn’t meddle with it.”

Dewey stared blankly. “Are you saying I should leave it be?”

Huey sighed. “Yes.”

“Oh, boo. They come to me because they want to know! What will happen if I stop telling them?”

“We stop getting extra allowance, for one,” Louie said nonchalantly.

Dewey kept telling others about the Strings when asked, whenever he could. And then one day all three of them saw Serina Bunting form a String with Honey Barkston, which everyone saw – the Forming was always visible to everyone, even though the Strings weren’t. And so, the people who saw came to Dewey to ask what color it was.

“I don’t know yet,” Dewey said truthfully. “It forms white, then it changes color. So I don’t know what color it is yet.”

“Well, when will you know?” a boy asked impatiently.

“When it changes color?”

“Okay, when will that be?”

“I don’t know. That’s up to them.”

The crowd dispersed in grumbles. The next day, Dewey saw hints of pink from Serina’s end and reluctantly admitted so. Words spread, and soon reached Serina and Honey, who responded to the rumors by absolutely refusing to talk to one another, their String growing faint and thin and the hints of pink darkening into sickly purple.

Dewey never told anyone else about the Strings and their colors, after that.

* * *

They duped Uncle Donald and managed to jumpstart the boat for their own trip, but Uncle Donald caught on and brought them to the manor atop the hill, and they found out they were grand nephews of _the_ Scrooge McDuck.

They met Webby when she caught and tied them upside down. Just as she released them, she lost her footing on the chair she stood on, and fell on top of them.

Something tugged at them, foreign but not unwelcome. A white String formed between the three of them and Webby and they stared at it in surprise.

“Welp,” Louie broke the stunned silence that followed, “maneuvering through the Strings is going to get even messier now, folks.”

Webby, excited by the prospect of having three whole soulmates for herself, new friends for herself, brought them to Uncle Scrooge’s garage to show off some of his collected artifacts. The resulting mayhem had Uncle Scrooge bringing them into an adventure to find Atlantis, and Dewey saw for himself the wedge between Uncle Scrooge and Uncle Donald that was somehow bridged in the high-stakes situations that followed. Despite it all, they prevailed, and they came out of it relatively unscathed.

By the end of the day, the triplets’ string with Webby had turned into sunny sunflower yellow.

By the end of the week, it turned pale, yellowish green, which grew greener by the day, and by the end of the month it was the color of newly grown spring leaves, just a touch lighter than the triplet’s own.

* * *

They were comfortable in their new room in the manor, but there were times when they missed the sway of the boat and joined Uncle Donald on the deck. There, they would see him stare out to the sky, his fingertips rubbing his left index finger, a faraway look in his eyes that they quickly identified as longing, and then at the sea, as he rubbed his middle finger, where two vibrant yellow that almost bordered on lime green String sat. He would hear them approach, and he would smile at them, gentle and bright as the shine of the moon above.

“Uncle Donald, why do Strings have different colors?” Huey would ask, like always, even though he’d heard the answer hundreds of times and read them closely in the guidebook hundreds more.

“Because each person’s relationship is different,” Uncle Donald would always answer, without fail. “Red is for romance. Yellow for friendship.” He would bend and ruffle their hair as his voice grew softer as he spoke, “Green, for you boys. For brothers, for sisters, for siblings.” He would straighten again and continue, “Blue, for parent and child, and purple for ones who can’t define it. And then there’s white for the newly formed Strings, and sometimes they don’t change colors and stay white. And then there’s black for enemies.”

“Enemies,” Louie would echo skeptically.

“Well, maybe not _enemies_ enemies,” Donald would answer. “Your mom can see strings, too. She said she’d never seen any purely back string. Mostly it’s just dark colors.”

Dewey would put his hand on Donald’s. “Tell us more about Mom?”

And Donald would, slowly, softly, each time a different story.

* * *

Not everyone had Strings. Mrs. Beakley didn’t have a String. Uncle Gladstone didn’t have one either, despite keeping a relatively good relationship with everyone he met. In contrast, Launchpad had an incredulously large amount of Strings, most of them white; apparently, he Formed Strings easily but they didn’t change colors a lot. More incredulous were the stories attached to each String, but this was Launchpad. The triplets weren’t sure he even could lie.

Uncle Scrooge had two, one that faded in and out of sight, stretched by distance, a dark color that was almost wine-red. The other one was a snapped string, withered, connected to no one, a shade of soft yellow that hung limply in tatters.

He would look up at Duckworth when he floated near, and the ghost butler would offer him a smile, soft and tired and sad.

Huey would wonder what it felt like, to have a snapped string. Seeing his brothers, he wasn’t sure he could handle it.

* * *

They followed Uncle Scrooge to the gala, watching how his connected String grow more solid with the closing distance. The wine red almost seemed to shimmer, and when one Goldie O’Gilt finally appeared and she and Uncle Scrooge’s gazes met, the color seemed to change into a vibrant, bold red for a single heartbeat before turning back into wine red.

“Watch your wallets, boys,” Uncle Scrooge warned, and the color of the String from his end seemed to darken, just a little.

“Please, Scrooge! I wouldn’t steal from children,” Goldie said. The String seemed to grow thicker with the lack of distance between them. They fell into a banter, one that was clearly well-practiced as they traded words as easily as a fish could swim. The triplets watched the exchange closely, looking back and forth as if following a tennis match.

“I am both disturbed and intrigued,” Dewey whispered lowly to Huey and Louie.

“Yeah, are they fighting or flirting?” Huey agreed.

“Both, definitely both,” Louie hissed. It was clear that there was some sort of tension between them, some sort of unresolved tension that they could almost slice if they so wished. Not even Glomgold’s intrusion could bother the two, and their String grew into a dark, velvety red when they danced. Even as Glomgold forced them apart, the String remained a dark red that grew gradually lighter as the night wore on.

And then Glomgold showed the exhibit and they saw that the skull was missing, and the String from Uncle Scrooge’s end grew into the same wine red that it had sported before. As they got to the manor and the two came head to head once more, the String from Goldie’s end matched the color. The color lightened again, just a touch, as they came to the agreement to work together.

The triplets egged them on, declaring a date that they denied vehemently, but their String turned a vibrant red just for a split second.

When Uncle Scrooge came back from their excursion with his String a shade darker than the vibrant red it sometimes sported, and the triplets showed no restraint poking fun at him.

“Okay, you kids, stop that,” he said, almost a snap. “It’s not like that.”

“Uhhh, your String is red enough for it to be _like that_ ,” Louie pointed out with a grin. It grew sly as Uncle Scrooge’s eyes grew wide, finally remembering that his nephews could see Strings when he couldn’t.

Uncle Scrooge groaned and climbed up the stairs. “You kids are as bad as your mother,” he grumbled, and it was enough to stop their laughter.

“You know about Mom being able to see Strings?” Huey asked.

Uncle Scrooge turned. “Aye,” he said, “so can _her_ mother. But not everyone in the family can.”

Dewey ran up the stairs to get closer to him. “Tell us about Mom and Grandma,” he said.

Uncle Scrooge led them to the dining table and told them stories, only stopping when Mrs. Beakley forced him to rest.

* * *

They met up with Uncle Donald’s old friends José and Panchito, and his yellow-almost-lime green String that had always seemed nearly invisible because of distance popped up brightly. They couldn’t help the smile when the three of them danced around each other, laughing and chattering in a mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, somehow understanding each other despite the blender of languages and phrases they used.

The triplets eyed the three of them and the identical Strings that connected them like a triangle. They had never seen Uncle Donald so cheerful before, so relaxed and at ease despite the lie he piled to hide the fact that he felt like a failure among his friends.

As the Caballeros shed the blanket of lies they pulled to impress their friends, their String seemed to deepen in color and grew thicker. They defeated the flower and the triplets wondered if that was how they would look like in decades to come, at ease with each other and stronger together.

* * *

Dewey came with Launchpad to meet Jim Starling, hoping to get the actor to sign some memorabilia for him. They met Drake Mallard in the signing, Launchpad clapping the man on the shoulder to calm him down.

They Formed a String.

Dewey watched, transfixed. Seeing Strings hadn’t felt special anymore, after seeing them for years, but watching a Forming had always seemed incredible, almost sacred. The String glowed white and dimmed, and for Dewey it was as clear as ever, but he knew that for others it was mostly invisible.

A part of him grew worried when Launchpad’s end seemed to grow darker, bordering on dark grey, as the day drew on, but something happened between him and Drake. Dewey almost didn’t realize it, but between the time Jim Starling left the meeting room and the time the studio went up in flames, something happened that reversed the process, and their String sported a nice, pastel yellow instead.

The next time Dewey and Launchpad met Drake Mallard the pastel had turned into a deep yellow that bordered on orange on Launchpad’s end, while it was almost red on Drake’s end. Dewey was content to sit back and wait until the color changed by itself into a vibrant red he was sure they would have in the end.

(Of course, it was disturbed when Gosalyn appeared and Formed her own String with Drake, but as impatient as Dewey was he knew String color change wasn’t something he could force. Besides, seeing the String between Gosalyn and Drake turn into a pale baby blue was as rewarding as seeing Drake and Launchpad’s string turn red.)

* * *

Louie called Goldie, hoping to get a mentor out of her, and Formed a String with her in the process. It surprised him as much as her, and it gave Louie some sort of relief to know that there was something he could do to rattle her.

(He told her he could see Strings. She laughed, thinking he was joking at first, but the look in his face stopped her and she stopped, admitting that she could see glimpses of them, too, sometimes, when she least expected them.)

Between waddling around in a pool and trying to backstab each other, their String had remained a constant white that seemed to refuse to change colors. By the time he managed to free her out of the glass cage Doofus Drake made for her, their white String had turned into something akin of extremely pale periwinkle, a hint of purple that was much stronger in Goldie’s end than the blue in Louie’s.

* * *

Dewey and Louie sneaked into Emma Glamour’s party, hoping to get Uncle Donald, José, and Panchito into the It List. They noticed Uncle Donald being absolutely taken by the biggest hurdle of their plan and, of course, put him in charge of keeping her busy, because what could go wrong.

(A lot could go wrong. Like ending up in a hostage situation, for example, though that had nothing to do with Uncle Donald being smitten with Daisy Duck.)

Apparently, Uncle Donald had been stuck in an elevator with Daisy, ended up tangled together in her purse strap, and Forming a String in the meanwhile. And then Uncle Donald had proceeded to serenade her and they had broken out of the powered down elevator and went to the party venue through the vents.

And proceeded to kick several asses together, including but not limited to Falcon himself and the one and only Emma Glamour. The Caballero may not have made Glamour’s It List, but Uncle Donald certainly made Dewey and Louie’s, as did Daisy, because holy cow. She showed Falcon no mercy.

When the excitement passed, Dewey and Louie noticed that Uncle Donald and Daisy had formed a String of their own, and despite being so newly made it was already tinted with the faintest of pink. By the time Uncle Donald went on stage to sing with his absolutely horrendous voice, they both learned, to their absolute disbelief, that Daisy found his voice charming enough to listen to all night.

They went back home with Uncle Donald having exchanged phone numbers with Daisy and their String a shade of rose pink that was rapidly turning into red.

* * *

Huey found a friend in Boyd and immediately Formed a String that quickly turned into the most garish neon yellow he’d ever seen. He brought Boyd to Gyro when Boyd’s laser eyes refused to cease in hope of getting help, only for the scientist to scream and demand Boyd to be removed from there.

Belatedly, Huey realized that Boyd and Gyro were connected with a String, a deep indigo blue at Boyd’s end and a worryingly dark purple at Gyro’s. They went to Japan to the old lab where Gyro had created Boyd under Akita’s guidance. Fenton took Boyd’s hand, paused when they Formed a String, and proceeded to coax Boyd into a budding superhero after his footsteps. After being separated, Boyd managed to tease the adventurer in Huey and they went to explore on their own, the yellow of their thread growing more mellow but just as vibrant as they went.

And then Gyro revealed that he had intended to shut Boyd for good, and Huey felt his blood boil in a way he hadn’t ever let himself feel before.

“Boyd’s a definitely real boy!” he argued stubbornly, glaring through Tezuka’s grimly determined expression, Gyro’s hard gaze, and Fenton’s conflicted grimace.

“2BO is a _machine_ ,” Gyro stressed.

“Then how did he Form Strings with us?” Huey asked, growing desperate. “He has one with me, and one with you, and one with Fenton. Machines don’t Form Strings, people do.”

Gyro closed his eyes. “2BO is a machine,” he repeated, “and a dangerous one at that. Shutting him down is the right thing to do.” He reached out to Boyd.

A wave of impulsive protectiveness washed over Huey and he jumped, grabbing Gyro’s arm to occupy him while he yelled at Boyd to run away. Of course, that was when it all went wrong.

Akita overrid Boyd’s programming and forced him into a killing machine. 2BO stood in the wake of what Boyd had been, an unfeeling robot instead of the boy with a heart too big to contain with Strings to spare. The Strings he had formed in what little time he had spent together with Huey, Gyro, and Fenton disappeared in a blink, nowhere to be found, nowhere to be felt, and Huey screamed through the pang of hollowness in his chest where Boyd should reside. He wondered if this was what Uncle Scrooge felt, to see his snapped String where someone should be connected to him.

Fenton proceeded to fight Boyd – _2BO_ , he wasn’t _Boyd_ , Boyd was a friend and a boy and not a killer robot – while Gyro’s resolve to shut 2BO down for good only seemed to strengthen. It flipped quickly into anger at Akita when Huey discovered that Boyd’s core memories was purposefully rewritten to turn 2BO into the mindless, merciless machine that it was, and Gyro quickly subdued Akita and called to 2BO, ensuring once more that he was a definitely real boy.

The Strings appeared again, visible to all as if Formed anew, and Gyro caught the child in his arms, enveloping him in a tight hug that did nothing to hide the indigo at the child’s end and the sky blue at the scientist’s. The yellow string he had with Huey reformed, a mellow shade of yellow similar to his sclera, as did the pale blue one he had Formed with Fenton.

The definitely real boy chose _Boyd_ as a name of his own, and Huey felt his chest settle with the Strings restored and Boyd back.

* * *

Mom came back like a storm, barging into their lives and leaving them breathless. There was no String between them, but the triplets felt like there was a hole that was slowly being patched, all the same, with her return. Out of the three of them, she Formed a String with Dewey, and the String Formed already blue, and they had to explain how Dewey had time travelled and met her as a child their age before.

She wasn’t perfect, but she tried, and that was good enough, at least for now. And she could see Strings the way they could, as clearly as Louie could, and it helped them bridge the gap that had formed in her absence. Slowly, she became a fixture in their life instead of some faraway figure they could only reach through stories and remembrances of the people she touched.

“I Formed a String with a Moonlander,” she said. “Her name is Penny, and she’s my roommate! It stayed white, though.”

“Moonlanders have Strings too?” Huey asked equal parts gobsmacked and amazed.

“Yeah, they do!” Mom answered enthusiastically. “Except they call it Destined Chords instead of Strings of Fate. But, you know, same difference. Same colors, too.”

She would spin tales of what she had done in the Moon, regaling them with gruesome tale of how she cut off her own leg and built herself a new one out of scrap metal and her friendship with the Moonlanders. Sometimes, when she thought they weren’t paying attention, she would stare out into the sea and run her fingertips over her left index finger, a faraway look in her eyes that they identified as longing, a twin gaze that they had seen appearing in Uncle Donald’s gaze for far too many times to count.

Louie would peer up at her and asked, softly, “Can you tell us more about you and Uncle Donald when you were kids? Uncle Donald don’t tell us a lot about himself.”

Her eyes would light up with mischief, and the triplets came out of it with far too many embarrassing Uncle Donald stories to count.

* * *

Webby went to the jungle with the de-aged Uncle Scrooge and Goldie while the triplets stayed at the hotel, and she immediately understood what they meant when they said the two were infuriating. They were so caught up in being young again that they didn’t realize how _obvious_ they were being, and Webby kind of wanted to rip her hair out.

Uncle Scrooge _blushed_ and Goldie _blushed_ and they kept stealing looks at each other and smiling bashfully and _flirting_ and they kept _blushing_ and Webby _definitely wanted to rip her hair out_.

They were definitely caught in some sort of fantasy about starting over while young, and Webby kept an eye on them, grumbling internally about being the adult in their little group when she wasn’t even old enough to drive yet. Things got back into track when they met Rockerduck and raced back to the hotel and between Goldie running back to the pool with the newly freed triplets in tow and Goldie and Uncle Scrooge fighting Ponce de Leon like a unit that breathed the same breath, switching swords between them as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

Webby freed the triplets from the pool float Ponce de Leon used to keep them immobilized, but there wasn’t much they were doing anyway, as they were mainly watching Uncle Scrooge and Goldie fight Ponce de Leon and basically enjoying the show.

“Are they always like that?” Webby asked. “They kept flirting and blushing in the jungle.”

“Oh boy, they’re just that bad,” Louie sighed. “The String is red.”

“Didn’t you say their String is usually dark red and kinda changes colors a lot?”

“Yep,” Huey said, popping the _p_. “But right now it’s red.”

“Really bright red,” Dewey added.

Uncle Scrooge lost his youth when he was dragged into the pool, and Goldie sacrificed hers to save him, plunging into the pool after a split second of hesitation. They distributed the youth water to the people whose youth had been stolen, and Goldie kissed Uncle Scrooge right at the beak.

“Oh my god, _they finally kissed_ ,” Huey yelled. “Do they know how long we’ve been waiting for that?!”

“Too long, definitely too long,” Louie said, shaking his head.

“I have to tell Mom about this,” Dewey added, gleefully taking a picture of the kissing couple and sending it to Aunt Della, allowing Webby, Huey, and Louie to see the content of his texts. The response came barely five seconds later, a string of exclamation marks paired with shocked face emoji, then a string of keymashed letters, then a question.

“What color is the String,” Dewey read, snorting in amusement as he typed the answer. “That’s the loudest shade of red I’ve ever seen, honestly.”

* * *

Their plane soared to the sky, and then it nosedived into the earth, and they crash landed on an island in the middle of nowhere. In the panic of the crash, they failed to notice a String that never seemed to be there before, shimmering into existence as the distance to earth grew smaller and smaller.

They found out Uncle Donald had been stuck there instead of being in the cruise, and for the first time they saw deep, lush forest green far deeper than their own looping around Mom and Uncle Donald’s index fingers, and for a moment they did nothing but stare at each other. Then they ran to each other, kicking up sand in the process, and pressed their bodies together as their arms curled around one another and hugged as hard as they could.

“I thought you died,” Uncle Donald said, voice thick with tears. He looked like he was trying to contain years and years of grief that finally started to push the dam out.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said, voice thick with regret. “If it makes you feel better, I couldn’t tell if you lived or died either. We were too far away. I couldn’t see the String.”

“It doesn’t but I appreciate your effort,” Uncle Donald laughed wetly.

It took some time to convince Mom to go back and fight Lunaris, and a laughably short time to convince Uncle Donald the same, and then they were off to Duckburg on top of a giant krill Fethry and Gladstone rode. Once upon a time the triplets would never thought of that sentence as something even remotely believable, but at this point, what wasn’t?

* * *

Webby had been friends with Lena and Violet for a while, now. She had accepted the fact that they would never be connected with a String, and that was okay. She chose to be with them anyway.

And then, during a sleepover at the manor, they Formed a three-way String that was apparently in similar fashion to the triplets’, already golden yellow like the sun. She stared at the Strings faded from her view.

“I thought you only Form Strings when you touch for the first time,” Webby exclaimed.

The conundrum had them running to Uncle Scrooge, in hope that he could help. They found him in his study, talking with Uncle Donald and Aunt Della, and words came tumbling out of their mouths in uncontrollable streams.

Uncle Scrooge managed to stop them from talking and coax them to tell him what happened. Huey and Violet ended up being the ones who gave Uncle Scrooge the explanation, mostly because they could gather their thoughts better and caught the others’ points and quickly formed them into more easily understood sentences.

“Oh, it’s not that weird,” Aunt Della assured. “It’s not common, but some people Form their Strings far later, and they’re typically already colored.”

“But why?” Violet asked.

“Sometimes it’s not fate that determine who stays in your life and who don’t,” Uncle Scrooge said. “Sometimes you choose them and fate relents.”

“And it’s really not that rare,” Uncle Donald added. He glanced at Aunt Della. “Mom used to say that all the time, right? She and Dad didn’t have a String at first.”

“And then later on a String appeared, just before Hortense became pregnant with you two,” Uncle Scrooge added. “She kept rubbing that into my face for some reason.”

Webby exchanged looks with Violet and Lena, smiled, and decided then and there that if fate did relent then she would definitely keep them in her life forever.

* * *

Louie stared at the tangled spiderwebs of Strings that he and his brothers had. They shot out to all directions, following the person they’re connected to, in an array of colors that made him think of a color wheel.

He smiled. If fate determined they should be the ones who stayed in his life, then who was he to disagree?

**Author's Note:**

> me, writing this without care which event came first and which came next in canon: _parkour_
> 
> also, for reference:  
> Red is for lovers (classic)  
> Yellow for friends basically  
> Green is more for siblings  
> Blue for parental  
> Purple for something the ppl connected to each other aren't calling anything or can't define  
> Black for enemies  
> Typically strings are formed white then change color as the relationship progresses. Some ppl's threads stay white but it's not common
> 
> come yell at me at my tumblr. [trash-raccoon](https://trash-raccoon.tumblr.com/) for my main blog and [twilighteve-writes](https://twilighteve-writes.tumblr.com/) for my writing blog.


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